The bottom four of my Top 10 represent a pretty diverse set of posts, taken from across a fairly long period of time – including one of the oldest, as well as one of the most recent.
#10 – an essay about the Paradox of Tragedy in Far Cry 2
(Note: if the link doesn’t work, paste this into your browser: https://ceasarbautista.com/essays/far_cry.html )
There are several academic, or borderline academic pieces in this list, and this piece by Caesar Bautista, is the first of them. I’m not sure when this piece was written – I think it might have been 2012. The idea that we can ‘feel good’ about playing a game wherein we do so much terrible stuff is nicely framed in the context of the Paradox of Tragedy, which I had not heard of prior to this article.
#9 – Playlist: Far Cry 2’s Abuses of Body and Story
This piece by Justin Keever from the middle of last year is the most recent piece on my Top 10. I disagree with a lot of Keever’s opinions in the piece, which is probably the main reason I chose to include it. There have been many criticisms of Far Cry 2, (and also many criticisms of the idea of ludonarrative dissonance), and for the most part I find the criticism more engaging than the praise.
#8 – War Crimes
This piece by Duncan Fife doesn’t actually escape the six month window that surrounded the release of the game, but I felt it worth including because it was one of the first to raise the question of the ethical issues that arise from the absence of civilians in the game world.
#7 – Another Life, Another Time: Far Cry 2 Revisited
Bearing the subtitle “A letter to a younger, angrier me”, I always enjoyed the format of this piece. Alec Meer, over at RPS, has a fresh take on a theme that has carried through the Far Cry 2 criticism over the years; that you need to be in a certain mindset in order for the game to ‘click’ for you – a mindset he wasn’t in when he’d played the game 5 years previously, but perhaps was when he wrote the piece.
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